Towards a Science Base for Digital Governance

Since the middle of the twentieth century, Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) have greatly assisted public sector organisations in their quest to provide better services to citizens and businesses. Currently, at a worldwide scale, governmental units at any level and sector are accelerating their efforts to utilize ICTs, due to their tremendous potential to enhance service quality, openness, transparency and ultimately quality of life and sustainable growth. Digital Governance has been recognized as a well- established application domain studying the problems related to the needs of public sector organisations and proposing novel methods and frameworks for enhancing service quality through the use of ICT. Substantial progress has been made through European and national funded research in a number of areas, yet the lack of scientific rigor in the Digital Governance domain seems to hinder unlocking the real transformative value and full potential to all its stakeholders, from researchers to industry and SMEs. Such a scientific “science base” would document the existing knowledge and open the pathway for systematic and reproducible solutions to identified problems, without the danger of repeating research or missing opportunities for application. The current paper moves towards this research direction, to systematize the needed tasks for the establishment of the Digital Governance Science Base by presenting its initial structure, gaining knowledge for neighboring domains and proposing the next steps for its evolution.